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Sports Teams as Superorganisms

Implications of Sociobiological Models of Behaviour for Research and Practice in Team Sports Performance Analysis

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Abstract

Significant criticisms have emerged on the way that collective behaviours in team sports have been traditionally evaluated. A major recommendation has been for future research and practice to focus on the interpersonal relationships developed between team players during performance. Most research has typically investigated team game performance in subunits (attack or defence), rather than considering the interactions of performers within the whole team. In this paper, we offer the view that team performance analysis could benefit from the adoption of biological models used to explain how repeated interactions between grouping individuals scale to emergent social collective behaviours. We highlight the advantages of conceptualizing sports teams as functional integrated ‘super-organisms’ and discuss innovative measurement tools, which might be used to capture the superorganismic properties of sports teams. These tools are suitable for revealing the idiosyncratic collective behaviours underlying the cooperative and competitive tendencies of different sports teams, particularly their coordination of labour and the most frequent channels of communication and patterns of interaction between team players. The principles and tools presented here can serve as the basis for novel approaches and applications of performance analysis devoted to understanding sports teams as cohesive, functioning, high-order organisms exhibiting their own peculiar behavioural patterns.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by a grant (SFRH/BD/43994/2008) awarded to Ricardo Duarte by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal). The authors wish to thank Hugo Foldado, Telmo Frias and Tsuyoshi Taki for their valuable help in some computation procedures. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are directly relevant to the content of this review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Expertise in Sports, Faculty of Human Kinetics, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ricardo Duarte & Duarte Araújo

  2. CIPER — Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Human Performance, Lisbon, Portugal

    Duarte Araújo & Vanda Correia

  3. School of Education and Communication, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal

    Vanda Correia

  4. School of Human Movement Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Keith Davids

  5. Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Estrada da Costa, 1495-688, Cruz Quebrada, Portugal

    Ricardo Duarte

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  1. Ricardo Duarte
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  2. Duarte Araújo
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  3. Vanda Correia
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  4. Keith Davids
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Correspondence to Ricardo Duarte.

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Duarte, R., Araújo, D., Correia, V. et al. Sports Teams as Superorganisms. Sports Med 42, 633–642 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03262285

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